So you have a website or social media account and you get content for pages and/or posts. But everything seems a bit boring and uninteresting. It’s understandable though.
Why? Because most people don’t know how to write for online consumption.
Every piece of content needs an improvement process before it gets posted. It all starts with the realization you have a problem. How can you tell? Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and read the content. Did you lose interest or find yourself skimming it quickly for an unobtainable point?
Then you need to make it more interesting. Here’s how:
- Start where the audience is. The headline and first sentence needs to attract interest. The easiest way: Don’t make the audience leap ahead. Consider the concern, goal, or mental state that your audience finds itself and start there. Voice it with the hope that you’re going to help them.
- Promise an achievable solution. Lead to a solution, benefit, or interesting point. Set up the content so it quickly tantalizes the reader that it’s coming (perhaps by assuring them you understand them and that you understand what they need).
- Deliver it. The moment you fail to give content they perceive as useful, needed, relevant or entertaining; you’ve failed and risk losing the audience’s attention. Online, we’re accustom to looking for bullet points (or bolded text) that gives us what we’re pursuing. Want to delight your audience? Deliver with bullet points.
- Edit the content shorter. Online, very few people want to read a lot of content. So, like I did with this article, eliminate everything that’s not needed. Think poetry and not prose. Have every word purposefully chosen. And, never, never have redundancy. When a reader thinks content is wordy with extra unnecessary content, they’ll skim and browse — so most of your content will be skipped. Do the skipping for them and only give them what they need! They’ll actually read more because you edited more!
- Add links. Because of the short content, how do you provide all that’s needed? Use links to lead people to additional (optional) content that might interest them. It’ll allow you to strip content from your post or page and keep the word count down.
- Be mindful of keywords. Read the content one more time and switch words to ensure that keywords or phrases, that someone would be googling to discover your content, are used appropriately. This will allow search engines to deliver an eager audience to your content (that is guaranteed to feel interesting).
